Fully funded DPhil studentship: Development and feasibility testing of an intervention to support people to lose weight through daily weighing

Applications are invited from individuals with a strong academic record who wish to develop a career in behavioural or primary care research. This is a three year award and will normally be taken up in October 2016. The student will become a member of Wolfson College and work within the  behavioural medicine team led by Prof Paul Aveyard in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences.

The studentship funding will cover all college and university fees and a contribution towards research and training costs. This award will fund tuition fees up to the value of Home/EU fees; students with overseas fee status are welcome to apply but will need to fund the remainder of their fees from alternative sources. The studentship provides an annual stipend (tax free allowance) on RCUK rates, currently £14,479.

The research study

Background

Observational evidence suggests that many successful weight loss maintainers are regular self-weighers. Trials show that adding daily self-weighing to a weight loss programme increases weight loss. The evidence suggests that self-weighing is effective because it encourages people to reflect on their past energy balance and make corrective actions to control their weight or maintain their weight loss. However, our randomised trial that simply instructed people to do this without other support showed no evidence of effect, implying that further coaching is needed. This studentship will help us understand the behavioural processes that link self-weighing to weight loss, encode these in a phone app to provide this coaching, and then test this in a proof of concept randomised trial. Although we set out here a series of studies, it is likely that this programme will evolve in line with the student’s interest and ideas and early phase results.

Methods

Study 1

Critical review of behavioural processes associated with weight loss from self-weighing and their inter-relationships to build an initial logic model. This will be followed by a think-aloud study where people use self-weighing without coaching to examine the differences in the psychological processes between people who are successfully or in successful in losing weight.

Study 2

Encoding the logic model into a supportive phone app and collecting initial user feedback to ensure the app works as intended and is perceived as helpful.

Study 3

A randomised trial incorporating 80 participants, sufficient to detect a 1.5kg difference in weight at two-month follow-up with a process assessment informed by the MRC Framework for Process Assessment of Complex Interventions.